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Tuesday, 11 August 2015

The Land of Green Ginger

Another
Virago for LibrayThing’s All Virago All August
challenge. And I think this one will do nicely for the What’s
in a Name challenge over at The Worm Hole – it’s my entry for a book with
the letters ‘ing’ in the title. And it fits the bill for Yorkshire, for Reading England 2015 (which you can find over at Behold the Stars).

The Land of Green Ginger, by Winifred Holtby.
Not, alas the 1983 Virago, but a 2012 edition,
with a Yorkshire Dales British Railways Poster
on the cover, which I quite like.

As
a small child Joanna Burton is entranced when she passes a street called The
Land of Green Ginger. Her aunts hustle her on, but the name conjures up
something magical for Joanna:

To be
offered such gifts of fortune, to seek Commercial Lane and to find – the day
before Christmas Eve and by lamplight too – the Land of Green Ginger, dark, narrow,
mysterious road to Heaven, to Fairy Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South
Africa, which was the goal of all men’s longing, where Father lived in a
rondavel…

The
heroine of Winifred Holtby’s The Land of
Green Ginger spends a lot of time yearning for far-flung, fabulous lands.
She is born in South Africa, but her mother dies, and her missionary father
cannot care for a baby, so she’s sent back home to England to be raised by her maiden
aunts in Yorkshire.

She
is highly imaginative, drawing her knowledge of life from books (she’s in love
with Walter Raleigh and the Scarlet Pimpernel), and she dreams of travelling
the world to see strange, exotic places. But in 1914, aged 18, she falls in
love with Teddy Leigh who tells her he has been given the world to wear as a
golden ball. At this point I started thinking of Milton, but it was a golden
chain which linked Earth to Heaven – but the golden ball was in the fairy tale
about the Frog Prince, and it seems that Teddy is paying tribute to Joanna, who
is golden haired, tall, and ‘grandly portioned’.

Teddy Leigh
drew towards her happiness and health as a chilled traveller draws towards a
fire. She seemed so young, so strong, so sure that life was good. He, who
snatched sudden joys from an uncertain world, looked at her with envious
longing. She seemed as strong and stablished as a golden tower.

It
is her vitality, her love of life that attracts him - but in the end those are
the qualities he comes to hate the most. For Teddy is a kind of Frog Prince in
reverse, who can never be rescued by a kiss. Handsome, charming, debonair, he
has TB, but Army medics have passed him as fit for active service and he is off
to join his unit, and feels he has been handed life as a golden ball.

He
and Joanna marry, and a daughter is duly born nine months after their brief honeymoon.
His visit home on a gunnery course results in a second daughter, and eventually
in June 1918 the combination of gas and consumption proves too much and he is
invalided out and ends up at the Yorkshire Military Sanatorium, where the true
nature of his illness is finally revealed to Joanna (but not by Teddy – he
never mentions it to her).

Unable
to return to Cambridge and continue studying for the ministry, he uses an Army
pay-out to buy Scatterthwaite, a run-down, isolated farm (at the time it was
believed open-air life helped consumptives). However, he and Joanna have no
money, no experience and no aptitude for farming. “Small debts prospered as did
nothing else on the land,” Holtby tells us.

Teddy,
faced with his broken dreams and broken health, is querulous, selfish and
demanding. Joanna struggles to make ends meet as she tries to care for him and run
the farm. Eventually, to protect the children from infection, sends them to her
aunts.

The Virago 1983 edition - I'd love this edition,but
can I justify two copies of the same book, even if
it is a Virago?

Growing
shabbier and shabbier, she develops a reputation for oddness – she’s viewed as a
bad housekeeper, a bad mother (because she sent her children away), and a bad
farmer. As the local curate observes, she looks strange (she is wearing green
stockings on the day he calls). And her behaviour is even more peculiar, for
she never says or does what you expect. She’s an unsettling sort of person.

Things
get worse when local landowner Sir Wentworth Marshall employs a group of Finns
to establish a forestry project. Local villagers resent the foreigners, and tensions
build. But the real trouble comes when the interpreter, Hungarian Paul Szermai,
comes to lodge with Joanna and Teddy. Joanna has already glimpsed Szermai in
the woods, envisioning him as Tam Lin from the old ballad, or a fairy tale eldritch
knight. There is no foundation for the
ensuing scandal, but their friendship is misinterpreted - even Teddy suspects
them of having an affair – and the story moves inexorably towards what should
be a final tragic conclusion.

I
won’t reveal what happens, but somehow Joanna finds herself again, and sets off
with her children to pursue her dream. Life is a good bargain, she tells Sir
Wentworth.

I mean,
imagine what it would be like if you were dead, and you looked up and saw people
acquiescing in life, and treating it like a poor thing, and saying, “You can’t
have the best of both worlds,” as a kind of reason for getting the best of
none. Wouldn’t you feel cheated? I should. I’d think, “Here am I who’d give
anything, anything to be alive again and there they are treating life like a
bad bargain.” Why, it’s the best bargain. It’s the only bargain worth buying if
you really live.

Joanna’s
struggle to find fulfilment is played out in the aftermath of WWI, and though
she is uninterested in politics and social change, things like employment
problems and the peace movement are there in the background. They are never intrusive,
but I think they inform much of Holtby’s work. I don't know that enjoyable is necessarily the right word to describe it. Compelling would be nearer the mark. But it's well worth reading - I'd recommend it.

*In
case you wonder, The Land of Green Ginger is a real street in Hull (Holtby’s
inspiration for Kingsport in novel), and is believed to have got its name
because in Tudor times it was the place where green ginger, a conserve of
ginger and lemon juice, was sold or made.

Yes, compelling is definitely the word. I'm spinning out the Holtbys I have left, because I really don't want to run out, but I am so tempted to pick up another one after seeing you read this and Anbolyn read Anderby Wold for AVAA,

Go on... You know you want to! Been hunting for my copy of South Riding for a re-read, but can't find it. So I ordered second-hand copies of Mandoa, Mandoa! and Poor Caroline...And iIf South Riding doesn't turn up I'll have to get that again!